Zombies are coming! They’re closing in. They’re fast but not agile. I race through the building, climbing stairs and slamming doors. There’s nothing I can use to defend myself except this banister I’ve ripped off the wall. The little metal bracket for mounting it on the wall comes in handy as I swing it wide and wildly. Must get to the roof! Can’t go back down.
The weirdest thing is that we don’t find it at all weird that the back yard starts an immediate sharp upward slow right outside the back door of the house. What frustrates us (dad and I) is that we can’t seem to get certain elements leveled like we expect. This trio of trees is unbalanced. We comment on how we need to get fortified against the coming zombies despite the fact that the greying skies indicate that nature will by us some time. (Zombies take refuge in rain storms.) He keeps trying to level these trees by pulling them up or else pushing them down. I wonder if they’re not connected somehow – - and pulling one up is just a recipe for the others getting pulled down. After a while I remark that we’d be wise to give up on this seemingly futile task now and just get back into the cover of the house and finish the interior fortifications. This is just too much for dad, who (having finally had it) chops down one of the trees. Once chopped down, the trees snap themselves into the form of televisions. My dad takes the axe blade and smashes in the newest of the three televisions. (This despite my protest that if he were to take vengeance out on any of them, why not the oldest-looking, least functional one?) He blows me off and explains that our energies are better spent elsewhere. He starts hauling the patio bricks inside.
We’ve (where “we” is a bunch of St. Mary’s folks) started a small software business and our office space is in a skyscraper-ish building in some unspecified city. We’re doing OK but like all small software businesses, it’s a little hit-or-miss some months. On this particular event, we’re embroiled in a head-to-head shouting match with some neighbors next door (a large government contractor type). We’ve urged them to lock their doors at night because we noticed they hadn’t been. Rather than take the suggestion though, their district manager (it’s a local office, see) keeps asking us what we were doing over there and how did we know that the doors were unlocked. I keep trying to explain to him that it was just serendipitous but he won’t listen. Eventually it gets to be too much and we just leave for our regularly scheduled barbeque — where Ben T. and Kenneth M. have been dancing pretty much all afternoon and A. keeps trying to get me to eat these Bourbon-soaked hot dogs two at a time.
There’s some kind of nasty illness going around St. Mary’s. It’s afflicting everyon; a Black Death-ish sort of thing that hits you hard for a couple of days and goes away. And then you wind up getting it again because you go back to class and getting it from someone else. I’m finally better and I’ve gone to the “BAT” (remember that?) with C.M. for some food. We wind up getting frustrated and leaving because there are no vegetables. As a vegetarian, this is a big problem for CM; for me it’s only a minor annoyance except that I need the vitamins and minerals to get well again. And a meatball sub just isn’t going to cut it for me. Besides, I need to get to class.
I hurry to class: an independent study with Joanne Klein. I scramble up the stairs to her office (or just our meeting place?) at the top of the Washington Monument. There are only five floors in the whole building and each floor is preposterously large — bigger on the inside than they ought to be. I’m briefly detained and interrogated by some Marines (in full dress uniform) on the 4th floor who needed me to play a quick round of basketball. By the time I get up to the 5th floor, Joanne is there waiting for me. I apologize for having been absent the past couple sessions. “I’d had that nasty Black Death-ish thing.” She replies that she’s just getting over it herself, blows her nose, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She’s switched to Camels.
Could this not be the ultimate in Cold War Era Nostalgia:
[tag]Denver[/tag], CO. 210 total acres. Very rare – 1 of only 18 built. Massive 45,000 + sq. ft. of underground floor-space; high chain-link fence around central complex; 2 high capacity deep wells in power dome; 3 missile silos all interconnected by ½ miles of tunnels. Mountain views, just 20 minutes from metropolitan area and international airport. Large capacity elevator intact, to be reconditioned. Under new ownership, massive clean-up and refurbishment underway. Many unique possibilities for commercial or private usage. Serious and capable buyers only.
[...]
[tag]Lewis[/tag], NY. [tag]Atlas F[/tag] site in the [tag]Adirondack Park[/tag] already under development by Australian owner, seeking free-spirited, compatible partner/investor for further development into a unique (M.A.S.H. theme) entertainment venue suitable for dance parties and other profitable commercial uses. Detailed development plans with cost and profit analysis are available for examination.
[...]
[tag]Pulaski[/tag], Indiana. Hardened Underground Communications vault on 5.5 acres (more or less), with frontage on the [tag]Tippecanoe River[/tag]. A 1960′s [tag]nuclear war[/tag]-proof communications center of 8,200 sq. ft. usable floor-space with 24″ thick walls and ceilings, with metal shielding enveloping the entire structure and 2’ to 4’ of earth covering all. Equipped with heavy blast doors, air vents with filter systems and blast valve closure mechanisms, and escape hatch emergency exit. Very large diesel generator in place. Lighting, pumps, heating & cooling and dehumidification, plus electric hoist – mostly operational and ready to use. Original blueprints and maintenance books go with. Many options for home-site, secure storage, or commercial / industrial retrofit. Located 75 miles from Chicago. Video $20
I don’t even know where to begin with how cool that is.
currently playing: Roots Manuva “Fever” > Sneaker Pimps “Spin Spin Sugar (Orbital remix)”
Almost two weeks ago, I announced that I’d completed the first draft of the novel I’d been working on over the past year. I had a few folks query me about the download for the complete PDF. To those: Thanks! To everyone else, here’s the first 503 words:
The fires in the Port Calvert Asylum burn the greenish-yellow that the mind paints on the word sick. You can see them burning in the refugee camps scattered just inside the perimeter fence — green-yellow tongues singing their songs to the sky and stars, anthems and laments both carried in the thinnest, whitest smoke. The sick green-yellow flames were produced by a log that was essentially a giant, arm-sized bean that the branch of the ICCC running the Port Calvert Asylum had had genetically engineered to provide ample heat and light while producing a minimum of ash, smoke, and other waste. We knew this because it was our co-op that grew those beans.
Getting in to the Port Calvert Asylum was the easy part. Getting in unnoticed was only slightly more challenging. Getting in without revealing ourselves to our pursuers however was the challenge with which we were faced.
Gregor and I had gone at each other’s throats during the flight from the Capitol Wastes over whether to stick to the original rendezvous or flee for the Port Calvert Asylum. Crewism dictated we head for the refugee quarters at Port Calvert, regroup, and figure out some fail over plan. I didn’t like the idea in the slightest but bit down for crewism’s sake and pushed harder on the wiser battle to split up while we figured out how to get inside. Gregor fought back hard on that plan saying we should keep tight and unified but ultimately backed down after the second close call with that trailing layvee. That near miss almost cost us all and we all knew it.
I took Viktor with me as we marched the last three kilometers to the south west gate while Gregor and the rest doubled back to hide wherever they could. We all knew that there wasn’t much cover but they had a better chance fleeing in the open than getting jammed up at one of the Port Calvert gates. The general feeling in the crew was we were two hairs from fucked whichever way we went. Viktor confided in me during the march that he was beginning to think the whole thing was hopelessly blown to shit once we got spotted. Not even 200 meters from the snatch, he kept saying, drawing himself tighter and tighter into the coarse brown cloak.
I was not sure if I could believe him or if I just did not want to believe him. It was naïve to think that we could have gotten away clean. A Soy Guild crew up against a troop from Pacifica? That was challenge enough but our stakes were so much higher and we knew that going in. None of us had had any illusions about that and Papa Ivan had sat us all down and given us each the option to back out with no shame. Maybe it was crewism that kept each of us looking in the faces of the others choosing to say it loud — Count Me In.
Not the whole first chapter but I hope with that to garner a bit more interest…
The above excerpt is protected by a [tag]Creative Commons[/tag] Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. Please respect my creative efforts.
Via A. & S.:
In A’s words: “creepy how accurate this personality test was….”
currently playing: Delerium “Amnesia”
About three months ago, I decided to pit my Safari/Mail experience up against Firefox/Thunderbird and see where that took me. Since I spend so much time in a web browser and an email client each day, I want to optimize my workflow as much as possible. I wanted to find the “one client to rule them all”, I guess. The one that would come to the forefront. What I found in the experience surprised me.
First, while Thunderbird is great for Windows PCs, I dropped it pretty quickly on the Mac. It had a couple of advantages over Mail that I could get down with but overall it just didn’t have any staying power. I kept my promise to myself and at least used it continuously for a solid month. But after a couple of crashes and some other nuances, I just gave up on it.
I gave up on Firefox, too. But only because I discovered Camino. If the MozDev community could come together on an email client like they did for the Camino web browser, all of my prayers would be answered. That said:
| Firefox Camino | Safari | |
| Alternate Styles | Firefox says: You can turn CSS on and off. You can switch to alternate embedded stylesheets. It rules. No alt styles here. Alas, it’s a nice dream though… 0 | Alternate what? 0 I’ve decided I don’t care about this too much… |
| Bookmark management | Camino has an awesome bookmark manager. Very similar to Safari’s in terms of UI – - but then it has all of the things that Safari’s SHOULD have. “Rich bookmarking” with descriptions and histories etc. Oh, and it uses an XML-based plist for storage, so it’s easy to roll your own sync service.+2 | I like how Safari handles bookmarks. It’s basically as simple as that. I like the UI. I like that you can sync the bookmarks plist between computers. +1 |
| Built-in RSS aggregator | None but: “Who cares when you have NNW?” What I don’t like is that there’s no RSS badge in the address bar or any other indication of an RSS feed’s presence.0 | Introduced with “Safari RSS” – - so it’s there, even if the implementation is kind of weird. Adding a bookmark to a site doesn’t automatically also add it’s RSS feed to the RSS collection. (What’s that all about?) Either way, who cares when you have NetNewsWire? 0 |
| Form handling | Can and will “tab through” form fields. Doesn’t always let me do the full keyboard control the way I’m used to from Windows machines? (Maybe that’s my problem?) Has a little trouble with checkboxes but in general does OK. 0 | Safari just doesn’t seem to want to play nice when I try to “tab through” form fields (not the way “it should” anyway – - see Dornfest’s “Tab to select…” for more on this…). -1 |
| “Open in Tabs…” | 2-clicks by default; configurable to 1-click; AND you can add bookmark groups to the Dock icon’s contextual menu. +2 | 1-click +1 |
| OS X Keychain support | Camino rocks the Keychain Access like a good Cocoa app should. +1 | Has it: integrates w/ OS X Keychain. +1 |
| Page text searching | Text searching on a page works just fine. Nothing special here though. 0 | Eh, it’s OK. At least I can “Cmd+G” to the next one. 0 |
| Rich bookmarking | (See above…) This is one of Camino’s highlights, in my opinion. I love being able to drop URLs into my “Web Grabs” folder with a little note to myself about WHY I wanted to come back and read it (or where I left off…) +1 | Bookmarking isn’t “rich” – - there’s no “last visited”, no “description”, nothing but the title and the URL (unless you count the ICO). You’d think that with Spotlight this would have been in Safari RSS “for sure” but apparently they spent more time converting the Bookmark plist files to binary. -1 |
| RTF/WYSIWYG editors | That’s the advantage of having the Gecko rendering engine under this Cocoa hood… Rich text editors work! +1 | Doesn’t play nice; most RTF/WYSIWYG inline apps/widgets don’t work. -1 |
| Searching in “textarea” elements | “Found it!” +1 | Doesn’t search in textarea elements. (I guess I was reaching on this one…) 0 |
| Stability | Overall, fairly solid. I’ve seen it crash but usually because I opened 45 tabs from a group (slight exaggeration) and half of them were crawling with Flash-based banner ads. Seems to be an odd bug though where the app will “SPOD” when opening groups of tabs and you can’t close any of them until they’ve all finished loading. 0 | Flaky at worst. I haven’t gotten any epic “SPOD” sessions like may folks ’round the web have reported but occasionally if I’ve got 22 tabs open and I go for one more and #23 is top-heavy with Flash, Safari decides to peace-out. But that combined with its inconsistency re: standards compliance makes this a bit of a cringer (though hardly a show-stopper). 0 |
| Standards compliance | Maybe it didn’t pass the Acid 2 test but as far as I can tell it’s compliant in every way that counts. Or at least it renders web pages “as expected”. Or is at least it’s designed to be. At least the rich text editors work. +1 | Allegedly the first browser to pass the Acid 2 test and earn the title of “most standards compliant” browser. Great! Then why does it have so much trouble with so many web pages in “real world” scenarios? 0 |
| Standard font settings | Proportional + Monospace defaults; Advanced… Serif, Sans-serif, Cursive, and Fantasy. +1 | Just “Standard font” and “Fixed-width font”? -1 |
| Tabbed browsing | “Are you sure you want to close 50 tabs?” +1 | “Oops, I just killed 50 tabs!” -1 |
| ZeroConf networking | Bonjour? +1 | Bonjour! +1 |
| TOTAL: | 12 | -1 |
So yeah, all that said, I can’t recommend Camino enough. I realize that a lot of this boils down to the “Gecko vs. WebKit” question w/r/t/ certain SITE features. However, the application features make their own compelling arguments. Like I’ve said a couple times now: How can Safari NOT have rich bookmarking when you factor in Spotlight? And another thing: What’s up with WebKit not being able to support all these rich text WYSIWYG editors out there? (Shiira can’t do it either.) The Gecko/MozDev people are standards-compliance FREAKS – - so I find it real hard to believe that Safari doesn’t support the rich text editors because they rely on proprietary codes or obscure forwards-compatible implementations…
Anyway. Yeah. Mail is good enough. But get Camino if you haven’t already.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
